Ten Conservative Myths About National Security
1. "Islamofascism" is America's biggest national security threat.
Not hardly. This is the hot new idea among far-right demagogues who literally can't define who they are without a devil to contrast themselves against, and military hawks looking for an excuse to keep the military-industrial complex's big all-night party rolling in the bleary morning-after of a post-Cold War world. But, as the Center for American Progress notes in this article, it's a dangerous meme that disables our ability to think clearly, and it will almost certainly lead us into even more catastrophic misadventures.
To begin with, "Islamofascism" itself is an impossible idea, and those who promote it betray a fundamental political ignorance. True fascism can only occur within an industrialized nation-state, few of which exist in the Islamic world. And many of our most intransigent problems with terrorism come from the opposite problem: modern terrorists have no state affiliations, and are thus free to drift across international borders with fluid ease. Defeating them means coming to grips with this fact. Calling them "fascists" makes it that much harder to grasp.
Worse, "Islamofascism" suggests that the Muslim world is some kind of vast monolithic conspiracy, equal in might and will to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany back in the day -- and that's another dangerous delusion. Just like Christianity, Islam covers a widely diverse range of cultures and political attitudes. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are not jihadis, and consider terrorism abhorrent. Turning one-quarter of the world's people into The Enemy will blind us to the subtle but critical distinctions within Islam. It will doom us to serious blunders, alienate potential allies, and cost us important opportunities to make real inroads against terrorism.
Spencer Ackerman suggests the term "anti-Western Salafist jihadism" as a replacement. Less catchy, perhaps, but more specific and not nearly so fraught with wrong assumptions that can cloud our thinking.
Having dispatched "Islamofascism," though, the more important point remains: Anti-Western Salafist jihadism isn't even America's biggest security threat. It's on the short list -- but so are global pandemics, loose nukes, our dependence on foreign energy, the catastrophic effects of climate change, the U.S.'s vast and bloated national debt, and our growing helplessness at producing essential goods for ourselves. As long as we're mired in an endless war to "defeat Islamofascism," we're going to remain weak, distracted, and grossly unprepared for the other serious security threats we face.
2. We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here.
False. The image here is that Iraq is some kind of roach hotel for global terrorism. The truth is, it's become the international finishing school where a new generation of terrorists is getting a front-line, real-time education against the American war machine -- and perfecting low-tech ways to close the gap against a high-tech army.
The U.S. official National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the war in Iraq has made new Islamic radicals where none existed before, greatly increasing the terror threat around the world. The number of significant terrorist incidents worldwide has risen every year of the war. In a bipartisan survey of national security experts last year, the consensus found that that the war in Iraq is making the world more dangerous for Americans. (To be fair, this same panel is a bit more upbeat this year, but still thinks the war is a grave mistake.) In the meantime, al-Qaida has regrouped in Pakistan, and is back at full strength -- while we've suffered more than 35,000 casualties and spent more than $550 billion, while alienating friends around the world.
"Fighting them there" hasn't been nearly the solution we were promised it would be.
